A8c team meetup Athens, 2019

During the first week of October, we had our team meetup in Athens, Greece.

We had a lot of projects going on, and one of them (which I was involved in) was working on the architecture of WooCommerce Services. It has wp-calypso as a dependency, and we wanted to move out of that and just rely on @wordpress/components. We have a PoC PR and wrote an internal P2 post about it.

Fun stuff, right? Now for the actual fun stuff. We did a lot of escape rooms. And I mean a lot.

Here are some pictures:

One of the escape rooms’ founder (Escapepolis) said they were inspired by point-and-click adventure games. I am a huge fan of those games and played a lot of them, to list a few: Beneath a Steel Sky, Broken Sword, Flight of the Amazon Queen, Monkey Island, Simon the Sorcerer, Thimbleweed Park, etc.

Anyway, my flight back home was 1 day after everybody else’s flights, so I had an extra layover day. I had to move out of the BnB and stay at a hotel and I decided to pick a hotel near the airport. The hotel I picked was in kind of a remote place. I felt this adventurous energy staying in this isolated hotel, with just me and a very old woman at the reception. As I checked in and moved to my small room, there was nothing else to do but…

…write an escape room game! That’s the theme (escape rooms) of this meetup right? And technically I’m still on the meetup (in Athens), even though everybody else was already on their flights home.

A few years ago I started writing my own (very simple) point-and-click game engine, however, it’s not ready to be open-sourced yet. I decided to finally use it and capture this single day in a game, figured it’ll be an interesting way to present the story. So I did: http://bor0.wpsandbox.me/escapebnb.html.

I think you can already tell this meetup had a very positive impact on me. Thanks to my team lead and to my teammates for making it a great experience!